THE END OF DAY.
Edith sprang from her chair trembling, abashed, overwhelmed. Mrs.
Grace fell back and stared at Hanbury. It was not a moment for
coherent thought or reasonable words. Even John Hanbury was as much
overcome as though the discovery came upon him then for the first
time. He felt more inclined for action than for words, and thought was
out of the question. He would have liked to jump upon a horse and ride
anywhere for life. He would have liked to plunge into a tumultuous
river and battle with the flood. The sight of lives imperilled by
fire, and rescue possible through him alone, would have afforded a
quieting relief in desperate and daring effort.
In his own room, the night before, when he came upon this astounding
news in his father's letter, the discovery brought only dreams and
visions, echoing voices of the past, and marvellous views of glories
and pageantries, splendours and infamies, a feeble ancestor and a
despoiled nation.
Now, here was the first effect of declaring his awful kinship to the
outside world. His mother's was he, and what was his glory, or infamy
of name, was hers; although she was not of the blood. He knew that
whatever he was, she was that also, body and soul. But here were two
women, one of whom was allied to his race, though stranger to his
blood; and the other of whom was remotely his cousin, whose ancestor
had been the sister of a king's wife, and he, the descendant of that
king. This young girl was kin, though not kind, they were of the
half-blood. Revealing his parentage to these two women, was as though
he assumed the shadowy crown of kingship in a council of his kinsfolk,
conferring and receiving homage.
A king! Descended from a king!
How had his mind shifted and wavered, uncertain. How had his
aspirations now fixed on one peak, now on another, until he felt in
doubt as to whether there were any stable principle in his whole
nature. How had his spirit now sympathised with the stern splendours
of war, and now with the ennobling glories of peace. How had he
trembled for the rights of the savage, and weighed the consideration
that civilization, not mere man, was the only thing to be counted of
value. How had he felt his pulses throb at the thought of the lofty
and etherealizing privileges of the upper classes, and sworn that
Christ's theory of charity to the poor, and fellowship with the simple
and humble, was the only way of tasting heaven, and acting God's will
while on earth. Had all these mutations, these dizzying and
distracting vacillations, been only the stirring of the kingly
principle in his veins?
After many meaningless exclamations and wide questions by Mrs. Grace,
and a few replies from Hanbury, the latter said, "I think the best
thing I can do is to tell you all I know, as briefly as possible."
"That will be the best," said Mrs. Grace. "But if the man who married
Kate Grace was a Pole, how did they come to call him a Frenchman?"
"No doubt he used French here in England, as being the most convenient
language for one who did not know English. Remember, he was a private
gentleman then."
"I thought you said he was a count?"
"Well, yes, of course he was a count; but I meant, he had no public
position such as he afterwards held, nor had he any hopes of being
more than plain Count Poniatowski."
"Oh, I see. Then may we hear the story?" She settled herself back in
her chair, taking the hand of her grand-daughter into the safe keeping
and affectionate clasp of both her hands.
"Towards the end of the first half of the eighteenth century, Count
Poniatowski, son of a Lituanian nobleman, came to England. He was a
man of great personal beauty and accomplishments. While he was in this
country he made the acquaintance of Sir Hanbury Williams, and became a
favourite with that poet and diplomatist. When Sir Hanbury went as
Ambassador to St. Petersburg, he took the young nobleman with him. In
the Russian capital, he attracted the attention of the Grand Duchess
Catherine. When she came to the Russian throne--when King Augustus
III. of Poland died, in 1764--Catherine, now Empress--used her
influence to such effect, that Stanislaus was elected King of Poland.
He was then thirty-two years of age. It was under this unfortunate
king that the infamous partition of Poland took place, and the kingdom
was abolished. Russia, Austria and Germany now own the country over
which Stanislaus once reigned."
"And how about Kate Grace?" asked the widow in a low voice.
"I am coming to that, as you may imagine, but I wanted first to tell
you who this man was. Well, Stanislaus spent a good while in England,
and among other places that he went to was Derbyshire, and there,
while staying in the neighbourhood with a gentleman, a friend of Sir
Hanbury Williams, he saw and fell in love with Kate Grace, the beauty
of the place in those times. He made love to her, and she ran away
with him, and was married to him in the name of Augustus Hanbury, in
the town of Derby, as the parish Register, my father says, shows to
this day. Subsequently she came to London and lived with him as his
wife, but under the name of Hanbury. He sent a substantial sum of
money to his father-in-law, and an assurance that Kate had been
legally married, but that, for family reasons, he could not
acknowledge his wife just then, but would later. Subsequently he went
to Russia in the train of his friend, Sir Hanbury Williams, leaving
behind him his wife and infant son comfortably provided for. He had
not been long in St. Petersburg when his King, Augustus III of Poland,
recalled him to that kingdom. Meanwhile, his wife, Kate Grace that had
been, died; they said of a broken heart. Young Stanislaus Hanbury, the
son of this marriage, was taken charge of by one of the Williams
family, and when Stanislaus became King of Poland, he sent further
moneys to the Graces, and to provide for his son, Stanislaus. But the
Graces never knew exactly the man their daughter had married. They
were quite sure she was legally married, and had no difficulty in
taking the money Stanislaus sent them. They were under the impression
their daughter had gone to France, that she died early, and that she
left no child."
"It is a most wonderful and romantic history," said the old woman in a
dazed way. The story had seemed to recede from her and hers, and to be
no more to her than a record of things done in China a thousand years
ago. The remote contact of her grand-daughter with the robes of a
crowned King, had for the time numbed her faculties. It seemed as
though the girl, upon the mere recital, must have suffered a change,
and that it would be necessary to readjust the relations between them.
Edith did not say anything. She merely pressed the under one of the
two hands that held hers.
"A very romantic history," said the visitor. "I have now told you whom
Kate Grace married. She married a man who, after her death, sat thirty
years on the throne of Poland, and was alive when that kingdom ceased
to exist. What this man was I will not say. It is not my place, as a
descendant of his, to tell his story. It has been told by many. I know
little of it, but what I know is far from creditable to him. Remember,
I never had my attention particularly directed to Stanislaus the
Second, or Poland, until last night, and since then I have been
enquiring after the living, and not unearthing the records of the
dead."
"And you never even suspected anything of this until last night?" said
Mrs. Grace, who now began slowly to recover the use of the ordinary
faculties of the mind.
"Never. Nor did my mother. In the long paper my father left in charge
of my mother he says he only heard the facts from some descendant of
Sir Hanbury Williams. When he found out who he really was he seemed to
have been seized with a positive horror of the blood in his veins, not
because of what it had done in the past, but of what it might do in
the future. He was a careful, timid man. He thought the best way to
kill the seed of ambition in the veins of a Hanbury would be to reduce
the position of the family from that of people of independent means to
that of traders. Hence he went into business in the City; although he
had no need of more money, he made a second fortune. He says his
theory was that, in these days, no man who ever made up parcels of
tea, or offered hides for sale, could aspire to a throne, and that no
man of business who was doing well at home, ever became a conspirator
abroad. When he saw I was taking a great interest in the struggles of
parties in France, he thought the best thing he could do would be to
let me know who I was, and leave me his opinion as to the folly of
risking anything in a foreign cause, when one could find ample
opportunity of employing one's public spirit usefully in England, for
notwithstanding his foreign blood, my father was an Englishman with
Englishmen against all the world. His instructions to my mother were,
that if, at any time, I showed signs of abandoning myself to excess in
politics, I was to get the paper, for if I leaned too much to the
people the knowledge that I had the blood of a King in me might modify
my ardour; and if I seemed likely to adopt the cause of any foreign
ruler or pretender, I might be restrained by a knowledge that, as far
as the experience of one of my ancestors went, unwelcome rulers meant
personal misery and national ruin."
"And, Mr. Hanbury, what do you purpose doing? Do you intend changing
your name and claiming your rights?"
"The only rights I have are those common to every Englishman. The name
I have worn I shall continue to wear. Though my great grandfather's
grandfather was for more than thirty years a king, there is not now a
rood of ground for his descendants to lord it over. This marriage of
Stanislaus Poniatowski with Kate Grace has been kept secret up to
this. Now I wish to bind you and Miss Grace to secrecy for the future.
I have told you the history of the past in order, not to glorify the
past and magnify the Hanburys, but in order to establish between you
two, and my mother and myself, the friendly relations which ought to
exist between kith and kin. You are the last left of your line and we
of ours. To divulge to the public what I have told you now would be to
expose us to ridicule. I came here yesterday in the design of saving
myself from ridicule a thousand times less than would follow if any
one said I set up claims to be descended from a king. I will tell you
the story of yesterday another time. Anyway, I hope I have made out
this evening that we are related. I know, if you will allow it, we
shall become friends. As earnest of our friendship will you give me
your hands?"
The old woman held out hers with the young girl's in it and Hanbury
stood up and bent and kissed the two hands.
Then Mrs. Grace began to cry and sob. It was strange to meet a kinsman
of her dead husband, and her son, and her son's child, so late in her
life, and it comforted her beyond containing herself, so she sobbed on
in gratitude.
"My mother, who is the greatest-hearted woman alive, will come to see
you both tomorrow. Fortunately all the Stanislaus or Grace, or
Hanbury, money was not in rotten banks, and as long as English Consols
hold their own there will be no need to seek a fortune in Millway or
any other part of Sussex. Edith, my cousin, I may call you Edith?" he
asked, gently taking her hand.
"If it pleases you," she said, speaking for the first time. She had
felt inclined to say "Sir," or "My Lord," or even "Sire." She had been
looking in mute astonishment at the being before her. She, who had
more respect for birth than for power, or wealth, or genius, had sat
there listening to the speech of this man as he referred to his origin
in an old nobility, and related the spreading splendours of his
forefathers blossoming into kingly honours, regal state! There,
sitting before her, at the close of this dull day of disenchantment
and sordid cares, was set a man who was heir not only to an ancient
title in Poland, but to the man who had sat, the last man who had sat,
in the royal chair of that historic land. Her heart swelled with a
rapture that was above pride, for it was unselfish. It was the
intoxicating joy one has in knowledge of something outside and beyond
one's self, as in the magnitude of space, the immensities of the
innumerable suns of the heavens, the ineffable tribute of the flowery
earth to the sun of summer. Her spirit rose to respect, veneration,
awe. What were the tinsel glories she had until that morning
attributed to her own house, compared with the imperial, solid, golden
magnificence of his race? Nothing. No better than the obscure shadows
of the forgotten moon compared with the present and insistent
effulgence of the zenith sun.
And, intolerable thought! the blood of this man had been allied with
the humble stream flowing in her veins, and he was calling her cousin,
and kissing her hand, he standing while she sat! instead of her
kneeling to kiss his hand and render him homage!
"My lord and my king," she thought. "Yes, my king. After a joy such as
this, the rest of life must seem a desert. After this night I shall
desire to live no more. I, who thought myself noble because I came of
an untitled soldier of the Conqueror's, am claimed as cousin by the
son of one who ruled in his country as William himself ruled in
England, from the throne!"
"And we shall be good friends," Hanbury said, smiling upon her.
"Yes," she said, having no hope or desire for better acquaintance with
the king in her heart, for who could be friends with her king, even
though there were remote ties of blood between them?
He caught the tone of doubt in the voice, and misconstrued it. "You
will not be so unkind, so unjust, as to visit my intrusion of
yesterday upon me?"
"No." How should one speak to a king when one could not use the common
titles or forms?
"You must know that the man I came with yesterday told me if I
accompanied him he would show me something more wonderful than miracle
gold."
"Yes," she said, for he paused, and her answer by some word or note
was necessary to show she was hearkening.
"And I came and saw you, Edith, but did not then know you were my
cousin, nor did you dream it?"
"No."
"You are the only relative I have living, except my mother, and you
will try and not be distant and cold with me?"
"Yes, I will try." But in the tone there was more than doubt.
"And you will call me John or Jack?"
"Oh!--no--no--no!" She slipped from her chair and knelt close to where
he stood.
"Are you faint?" he cried, bending over her anxiously.
"I am better now," she said, rising.
Unknown to him she had stooped and kissed his hand.
END OF VOLUME II.
End of Project Gutenberg's Miracle Gold (Vol. 2 of 3), by Richard Dowling